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Human sound-localization behavior accounts for ocular drift
Tom J Van Grootel1, A John Van Opstal
1Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Department of Biophysics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Journal of Neurophysiology
|January 29, 2010
Summary
Accurate sound-guided eye movements in darkness rely on a dynamic eye position signal. However, this signal is slightly underestimated, causing minor, direction-dependent localization errors.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Oculomotor control
- Auditory spatial processing
Background:
- Generating accurate saccades to sound in darkness requires transforming head-centered auditory information into eye-centered motor commands.
- This transformation necessitates an eye-in-head position signal to account for gaze direction.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether the spatial mapping stage uses a continuous or sampled representation of eye position.
- To determine if the oculomotor neural integrator's leaky property affects auditory-visual transformation in darkness.
Main Methods:
- Exploiting the leaky nature of the oculomotor neural integrator (time constant ~20 s) in complete darkness.
- Analyzing saccade accuracy toward auditory targets to assess the eye-position signal's representation.
Main Results:
- Sound location is accurately represented during the transformation process.
- The transformation utilizes a dynamic eye-position signal.
- This dynamic signal is slightly underestimated, resulting in systematic localization errors that correlate with eye position direction.
Conclusions:
- The brain uses a dynamic, albeit slightly underestimated, eye-position signal for sound-guided saccades in darkness.
- This underestimation leads to predictable spatial localization errors dependent on gaze direction.
